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Mark Costello
Big If
W.W. Norton
Secret Service agents lead unusual social lives. Bobbie, an aging beauty queen, gets into a three-way with George Will at the Republican National Convention but pines for her admiral boyfriend. Single mom Gr...

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Ah, the Fringe, the Fringe, the Fringe. Here it is, the one Twin Cities theatrical experience that fully deserves to be referred to as an event. There are familiar pleasures to be had at any Fringe, many of them tangential to the 130-odd shows on o...

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A few years back, when the Internet was still an unexplored frontier, one of the praises steadily sung about the medium was its power to disseminate information. On the World Wide Web, converts chirped, there was no need for a printer or distributor...

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On a weekday in late March at about 10:00 a.m., Sean Doyle showed up at the diStilo Gallery on Dupont Avenue South with two pickup trucks, a 24-foot dock truck, and seven accomplices. The 38-year-old fashion designer jimmied the lock on the front d...

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When staffers from the private consulting firm McKinsey & Company embarked upon the company's pro bono study of how to reorganize the economic-development process in the City of Minneapolis, they noticed a rare phenomenon. "When we looked at major ...

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When Minnesota Appeals Court Judge Roland Amundson pleaded guilty in April to stealing more than $300,000 from a trust fund he was managing for a developmentally disabled woman, the crime made headlines. While he was at it, Amundson appears to have...

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Choreographers Deborah Jinza Thayer and Wynn Fricke come from different sides of the periodic table--one the essence of ether, the other of earth. Thayer, a former pre-med student, is fond of reinventing the relationship between technology and the bo...

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For my tastes, the best show in town this humid summer is the weekly, impromptu parade of lowriders, muscle cars, and vintage automobiles that strut up and down University Avenue for most of the night every Saturday. And I'm not alone: The Midway i...

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The 1963 musical Bye Bye Birdie may have given rock 'n' roll fan culture its first mainstream exposure, and in some ways, the modern fan clubs it lampoons have been trying to live it down ever since. Birdie, for those who managed to steer clear of th...

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Bill Klein wants to be able to buy socks in Inver Grove Heights. And shirts. And shoes.
"How big is Inver Grove Heights?" asks Klein, a member of the southeastern suburb's city council. "Thirty thousand people. That's a pretty big town, isn't it...

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[Editor's note: A correction ran concerning this story; see end of article.]
It's noon and the ninth annual convention of the Independence Party of Minnesota is taking a break for lunch. The party delegates are in the heart of the St. Cloud Stat...

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Everybody wants to be a geek," Big Brain Comics proprietor Michael Drivas tells me. "Everybody wants to have a command of some cool specialized body of knowledge." As someone who walks the geek walk 24-7, Drivas should know; he's also just given me s...

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You know how the CIA cooked up crack to devastate the inner cities? Maybe hip hop was devised by street scientists to transform the academy into a gibbering nation of Arnold Horshacks ooh-oohing that they know what a DJ scratch "really means"--that...

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Kats Fukasawa has coined a culinary term for his dance technique: "Paneer Masala"--spicy cheese to you and me. It makes sense when you learn that the 31-year-old choreographer adores the Technicolor tackiness of Bollywood, and all things Indian for t...

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If playwright Craig Wright appeared comically dour at the opening of his last production, Molly's Delicious, at the Jungle Theater--and he did--tonight he seems particularly garrulous. It is the opening of his new play, titled Orange Flower Water, th...

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Contestant Number Three isn't wearing any underwear.
I'm privy to this fact because I have a front-row seat at the very tip of the runway, where Number Three has just done a half-pirouette and retreated in her very high heels. Contestant Number Th...

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On June 29 the Star Tribune published a story rife with acrimony. Minneapolis City Council members Lisa Goodman and Natalie Johnson Lee were battling over Johnson Lee's proposal to have a new street named after Sharon Sayles Belton, the city's firs...

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There are four generations of tractors on the McCarvel family farm just outside Brewster. The oldest, a John Deere that surely saw the Second World War, is dwarfed by a model that's probably too young to remember the Gulf War, complete with a clima...

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Over the past year, Lou Fancher and Emily Johnson, choreographers known for their smart and well-wrought dances, have created works that dive right into emotional maelstroms. In a shared program this weekend at the Southern Theater (the first in th...

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Imagine, for a moment, that you are impaneled on a jury, listening to detailed, complicated DNA evidence implicating the defendant in a rape--or a murder. Blown-up charts and graphs rest on easels in front of you. A scientist is pointing at differe...